ached the chair
and sat down, and they fitted the helmet over his head and attached the
electrodes. They used to make a witness take some kind of an oath to tell
the truth. They didn't any more. They didn't need to.

As soon as the veridicator was on, he looked up at the big screen behind
the three judges; the globe above his head was a glaring red. There was a
titter of laughter. Nobody in the Courtroom knew better than he what was
happening. He had screens in his laboratory that broke it all down into
individual patterns--the steady pulsing waves from the cortex, the alpha
and beta waves; beta-aleph and beta-beth and beta-gimel and beta-daleth.
The thalamic waves. He thought of all of them, and of the electromagnetic
events which accompanied brain activity. As he did, the red faded and the
globe became blue. He was no longer suppressing statements and
substituting other statements he knew to be false. If he could keep it
that way. But, sooner or later, he knew, he wouldn't be able to.

The globe stayed blue while he named himself and stated his professional
background. There was a brief flicker of red while he was listing his
publication--that paper, entirely the work of one of his students, which
he had published under his own name. He had forgotten about that, but his
conscience hadn't.

"Dr. Mallin," the oldest of the three judges, who sat in the middle,
began, "what, in your professional opinion, is the difference between
sapient and nonsapient mentation?"

"The ability to think consciously," he stated. The globe stayed blue.

"Do you mean that nonsapient animals aren't conscious, or do you mean they
don't think?"

"Well, neither. Any life form with a central nervous system has some
consciousness--awareness of existence and of its surroundings. And
anything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest. What I
meant was that only the sapient mind thinks and knows that it is
thinking."

He was perfectly safe so far. He talked about sensory stimuli and
responses, and about conditioned reflexes. He went back to the first
century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud. The globe never
flickered.

"The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is immediately present to
the senses and responds automatically. It will perceive something and make
a single statement about it--this is good to eat, this sensation is
unpleasant, this is a sex-gratification object, this is dangerous. The
sapient mind